Winging along at an altitude somewhere between the Bluebird of Happiness and the Chicken of Depression... random esoterica from writer Chad Love celebrating the joys of fishing, hunting, books, guns, gundogs, music, literature, travel, lonely places, wildness, history, art, misanthropy, scotch and the never-ending absurdity of life.

Two (2) chips per contestant. Chip thrown the farthest shall be the only one counted. If the chip breaks up in mid-air during the throw, the piece going the farthest will be counted. (This does not mean the chip hits the ground and then breaks up.)Contestants are divided into the following: Men's Open Division; Women's Open Division; VIP Division and Team Division (Must be at least 16 years of age to participate)Chips shall be at least six (6) inches in diameter.Contestants shall select their own chip from the officialwagon provided by the B.S. EnterpriseCommittee.To alter or shape the chips selected from the wagon in any way (except in the rare instance when a loose fragment may be removed and provided that the removal does not render that chip less than (6) inches in diameter), subjects the contestant to a twenty-five (25) foot penalty. Decision of the Chip Judge is final.

Oklahoma clay pigeon enthusiast (AKA "shithead")...

On second thought, it might be better to just stick to regular clays...

Wednesday, October 26, 2011

"If, on your journey, should you encounter God, God will be cut." Hattori Hanzo, from "Kill Bill: Vol. 1"

Ok, so maybe it's not that sharp, but it's damn sharp. Charles May BladieMae. D2. Black canvas micarta. Nickel pins. Nothing fancy, just form following function. Will still shave hair off a forearm after breaking down a deer.

One of my favorite knives from one of my favorite knifemakers. I've got a review of his bird and trout knife (in S30V rather than D2) coming up on the Field & Stream gundogs blog, but the BladieMae remains my favorite all-around knife. I got this one in trade on the secondary market. If you want a new one, it's about a ten-month wait.

Charlie is one of the relatively few knifemakers out there (other than dedicated bushcrafter knifemakers) who offers his knives - any of them - with a scandi grind, and if I could ever scrape up the coin (which I can't, of course...) I'd have him make me a scandi-grind BladieMae in a heartbeat...

Tuesday, October 25, 2011

Because books were meant to be stored on shelves, not on the digital dildo of the moment. They were meant to be held, read, admired, cherished, displayed and eventually passed on, not downloaded, copied, pasted, and stored as binary code on some goddamned corporate-controlled HAL 9000 with a catchy, bullshit, focus group-derived name...

"Dickens, open my Kurt Vonnegut file, please." "I'm sorry, Chad. I'm afraid I can't do that. Your Vonnegut file has been deleted as a result of our new corporate guidelines on the downloading of seditious and/or obscene materials. We regret the inconvenience. Would you care to download the latest young adult paranormal romance thriller* instead?"

All the goldbugs bitch and moan about the ephemeral nature of fiat currency, but no one ever says anything about fiat literature. Why is that?

But I digress. The original point of the blog (and really, it did have one, sort of) was to give a link to Steve over at Querencia, who recently put up a couple posts here and here with pics of some of his bookshelves. Proper bookshelves, chockablock with books, memories and mementos.

Cool stuff, and definitely worth a look. That's what I consider a proper e-reader (eclectic reader), one that never needs to be upgraded or replaced, and one that sports an indefinite battery life...

* Actual (and large) genre (with its own aisle!) I observed during a recent visit to a Barnes & Noble. The shelves were packed with titles and the aisle was packed with browsers. We're all fuckin' doomed...

*Definitely not my bookshelf, though I wish it were... the pic is from Shakespeare & Co. in Paris.

Thursday, October 20, 2011

Forget that horrid, slimy, breaded, undercooked mess that restaurants try to pass off as "fried okra." The only acceptable way to cook okra is to lightly coat it with cornmeal, salt, and pepper (no breading and for god's sake no batter) and then fry it in a hot cast-iron skillet until it's crunchy, crispy and almost black (it's actually not quite done in this pic...).

Any other way is simply an abomination...

That represents the year's last batch of okra from the "Stick It To Big Agri-Business Revolutionary Garden." Never thought I'd still be getting okra on October 18. Maybe there's a silver lining to catastrophic climate change, after all...

This year's garden was a mixed bag. We ended up with a good okra crop, and our squash and zucchini harvest needed to be measured in metric tons. On the other hand the seventy-odd days of hundred-degree (and often much higher) heat completely shut down most everything else. None of the watermelon, tomatoes, eggplant or bell peppers produced anything until it started cooling down.

So now I've got tons of green tomatoes, tiny eggplants and itsy-bitsy melons, all doomed since we got our first good freeze last night.

Just as well, really. Duck season's nine days away, quail season opens Nov. 12 and I guess if I can muster the interest there's also a deer season or two mixed in there somewhere. Fall is no time to be messing around with vegetables, anyway...

Tuesday, October 18, 2011

A few writing-related quotes from perhaps the most acerbic wit of 20th-century journalism...

“...an author, like any other so-called artist, is a man in whom the normal vanity of all men is so vastly exaggerated that he finds it a sheer impossibility to hold it in. His over-powering impulse is to gyrate before his fellow men, flapping his wings and emitting defiant yells. This being forbidden by the police of all civilized nations, he takes it out by putting his yells on paper. Such is the thing called self-expression.”

“Any man who afflicts the human race with ideas must be prepared to see them misunderstood. ”

“I know of no American who starts from a higher level of aspiration than the journalist. . . . He plans to be both an artist and a moralist -- a master of lovely words and merchant of sound ideas. He ends, commonly, as the most depressing jackass of his community -- that is, if his career goes on to what is called a success.”

“Believing passionately in the palpably not true... is the chief occupation of mankind.” (not really about writing, but I'm making it so).

In other news...

An interesting account of how one first-time novelist (but established writer) came to the decision that giving away his self-published debut novel for almost nothing made the most economic sense, via BoingBoing

It's worth a read, especially for those aspiring (is there any other kind?) book authors who can't seem to gain any traction trudging along the traditional book publishing path (And if there are any literary agents out there, I'm now holding up a cardboard sign that reads "Will Work for Representation and/or Food").

A quote from the last graf...

As the screenwriter William Goldman said years ago about Hollywood, Nobody knows anything. You try something, you try something else, you try everything, even things that sound insane, because in an industry where the longstanding business model has been upended, everything else has been upended too, even the gravitational tug of logic. If you want to get rich, value your work at zero. Yes, okay, it reads like the last line of a Zen koan. But self-publishing’s best practices are still unwritten, so really: Why not? That tactical freedom might be the most disruptive, the most liberating part of the whole self-publishing business.

I'm still trying to decide if that's a fair statement or self-delusional bullshit. I'm thinking the latter, mebbe?

And if you're a writer or journalist who just doesn't have enough despair in your life (and who couldn't use a little more despair, right?) I'll now direct you to this cheerful little report on the current state of the alleged creative class, via Salon

Read it, writers, and weep for the present, never mind the future, 'cause there 'aint one...

Listen to the optimists and the great recession sounds like a great opportunity. This is the time for the creative class to brand itself! A day job, they say, is so 20th century – as quaint and outdated as tail fins and manual sewing machines. Thanks to laptops, cheap Internet connections and structural changes in the world economy, we’re living in a world of “free agents” – “soloists” who are “self-branding” and empowered to live flexible and self-determining lives full of meaning.

We are all citizens of Freelance Nation — heirs not to the old-school stodgy, gray-flannel-suit Organization Man but to the coonskin-capped pioneers and rugged, self-made types who built this country.

But for those who must actually scrape together work in this new “gig economy” – architects, filmmakers, writers, musicians, bookstore managers, graphic designers and other downsized members of the creative class, folks made obsolete by the Internet and the current predatory style ofcorporations – Freelance Nation is a place where they fight to keep a home or medical insurance.

Some are losing their houses. Others are watching marriages go up in smoke or falling into heavy drinking. Still others are couch-jumping for months or years at a time. Or they’re veering close to bankruptcy because of the risk of living without medical insurance. Call it the new creative destruction.

"...In fact, many free agents see themselves not as freewheeling soloists but as permatemps and content serfs."

Content serfs. I like that one, because in the sucker's game that is modern freelancing, that's exactly what you are - a serf. And if you don't like it, if you can't live on what they offer, then tough shit, there's another serf waiting right behind you who'll do it for less. Move along, and don't let the door hit your ass on the way out.

Haven't you heard, dumbshit? Everyone's a writer these days...*

* Of course, the ironic thing is that most of the really good writing I'm finding these days is on personal blogs...

Friday, October 7, 2011

"Have you ever dreamed of hunting waterfowl on TV with a professional sportsman?"

A "professional sportsman?" What? You mean like this guy?

I've met a few "professional sportsmen." And the only thing I ever dreamed about was getting the hell away from them as quickly as possible. But then again, I always was a sloth-infused small-time dreamer with no real vision, so if it's your dream - out of all the possible dreams in the world - to hunt waterfowl on TV with a "professional" sportsman, then who am I to judge? Reach for the stars, dude...

Wednesday, October 5, 2011

Apologies for the lull. I've got blog material stacked up (hunting trips, books, decoys, dogs, the shitty and depressing state of writing as a viable career, and many other random thoughts) but I've been busy the past three weeks and haven't quite had the time to sit down and write anything.

So of course I'm copping out (temporarily) by recycling an old post that maybe a few of you haven't seen. Lazy, I know. So sue me...

I have no idea what story is contained within this picture's alloted thousand words, but I was cleaning out some files in anticipation of switching over to a new computer this weekend when I stumbled across it and said "that's so weird it needs to be on the blog".

I took it some years back on a state highway somewhere between the southeastern Oklahoma towns of Antlers and Broken Bow. As I was driving along I looked over, saw something dangling from the highway sign, thought "what the hell?" and turned around to take a look.

It turned out to be a string of decapitated catfish, mainly flatheads. I have no idea what compelled someone to hang them there: an angler's pride, some kind of hillbilly voodoo, perhaps a warning to to stay the hell on the main roads (homegrown weed is and always has been a big cash crop in the mountains of SE Oklahoma). I never figured it out. I snapped the picture, looked over my shoulder to make sure Leatherface wasn't watching from the trees and got back in my truck.

I shouldn't have been surprised, though. My mother was born and raised in Antlers and I still have a pile of relatives down that way. I spent a lot of time there as a child so I was well aware things are a little, well...different in that part of the state.

How different? When I took that picture I was down there on an assignment, writing about... Bigfoot. Yep, it's that kind of place. Beautiful, but strange, a little spooky and completely unlike the popular image of Oklahoma.

The year prior I had been down there on another assignment, writing about Oklahoma's timber industry. While there I had arranged to drive around some logging sites with a local timber company foreman. As I got into his truck and snapped my seatbelt into place he looked over at me and quite unexpectedly asked "You gotchaself a gun, doncha?"

Now, for those unfamiliar with that part of Oklahoma, it's as rugged, as isolated, as wild and as suspicious of outsiders as any place in the country. I was going to be spending all day in the woods with this guy, alone. And here he was asking me if I happened to have a gun on me. Cue banjos.

As it turns out I did, in point of fact, have myself a gun. Yep, it's that kind of place. Notebook? Check. Tape Recorder? Check. Camera? Check. Glock? Check. But I wasn't sure if I should tell him or not. I didn't know this guy from Adam. And he was big, kind of wild-looking. I was from "the city." Cue banjos again.

Would it be tactically prudent to keep it a secret or should I just come out and say upfront that I was packing. Was it a trick question? Would I be violating some company policy? The question, however, was rendered moot as he pulled a scoped .223 from behind the seat and shoved the barrel into the floorboard next to me.

"This is for coyotes 'an such," he informed me with a grin. I instantly wondered if nosy reporters, taxonomically speaking, fell into the "such" genus. "But," he continued, "Ah don' go nowheres roun chere without a gun. Dope growers. An there some roads you doan wanna go down even then."

Great. With the prospect of armed conflict apparently part of the day's tour, I figured I might as well tell him. He gave me an approving look and off we went, engaged in perhaps the most heavily-armed interview in Oklahoma journalism history. Yep, it's that kind of place.

I never ran into Tony Montana and his little friend on that trip, and I after I snapped this picture I went on, but never found Bigfoot, either.

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About Me

Chad Love is a full-time freelance writer/photographer whose work has appeared in a number of publications, a few of which even paid him. But not much.
Along the way Chad has won awards from the Associated Press, the Society of Professional Journalists, the International Regional Magazine Association, the National Shooting Sports Foundation and the Oklahoma Wildlife Federation.